John Playfair
| John Playfair | |
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John Playfair – Portrait by Sir Henry Raeburn
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| Born |
10 March 1748 Benvie, Forfarshire, Scotland |
| Died | 20 July 1819 (aged 71) Burntisland, Fife, Scotland |
| Known for | Playfair's axiom |
John Playfair FRSE, FRS (10 March 1748 – 20 July 1819) was a Scottish scientist and mathematician, and a professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He is perhaps best known for his book Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (1802), which summarised the work of James Hutton. It was through this book that Hutton's principle of uniformitarianism, later taken up by Charles Lyell, first reached a wide audience. Playfair's textbook Elements of Geometry made a brief expression of Euclid's parallel postulate known now as Playfair's axiom.
Born at Benvie, near Dundee, where his father, Rev James Playfair (d.1772), was a kirk minister.
Playfair was educated at home until the age of fourteen, when he entered the University of St Andrews. In 1766, when only eighteen, he was a candidate for the chair of mathematics in Marischal College (now part of the University of Aberdeen), and, although he was unsuccessful, his claims were admitted to be high.
Six years later he applied for the chair of natural philosophy in his own university, but again without success, and in 1773 he was offered and accepted the benefice of the united parishes of Liff and Benvie, vacant by the death of his father. Playfair continued, however, his mathematical and physical studies, and in 1782 he resigned his charge to become the tutor of Ferguson of Raith. By this arrangement, Playfair was able to be frequently in Edinburgh and to cultivate the literary and scientific society for which it was at that time specially distinguished. In particular, he attended the natural history course of John Walker. Through Nevil Maskelyne, whose acquaintance he had first made in the course of the celebrated Schiehallion experiments in 1774, he also gained access to the scientific circles of London. In 1785 when Dugald Stewart succeeded Ferguson in the Edinburgh chair of moral philosophy, Playfair succeeded the former in that of mathematics.
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